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Pharma giant Roche announced an extended partnership with NVIDIA to deploy a hybrid-cloud AI factory powered by the chip maker's computing and AI to support drug discovery, clinical trial efficiency and unlock data insights.
Roche will deploy 2,176 high-performance GPUs on-premises across the U.S. and Europe, bringing its combined on-premises and cloud GPU infrastructure to more than 3,500 Blackwell GPUs.
The pharma giant said the new computational infrastructure is a supercomputing platform that will power AI-powered drug discovery and development.
The computational expansion will see Roche use NVIDIA's BioNeMo platform for research and development, enabling scientists to test hypotheses at scale.
It will also use the chip maker's digital twin technology, NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, for manufacturing to create virtual replicas of production lines, and NVIDIA Parabricks software and computing to gather insights across large datasets, scanning images to detect disease patterns.
Roche will also use NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails for healthcare-grade conversational AI.
"Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA and the launch of this AI factory further strengthens our leadership in AI-driven drug discovery and development," Aviv Regev, executive VP and head of Genentech Research and Early Development, an independent research unit within Roche, said in a statement.
"By providing the massive computational power needed to continue to scale our Lab-in-the-Loop strategy – a space we have pioneered for over five years – our scientists can build more sophisticated predictive frontier models and further shorten the path from biological insight to life-saving medicine."
THE LARGER TREND
The extended partnership builds on Roche and NVIDIA's original multiyear strategic research collaboration announced in 2023, which combined Genentech’s AI capabilities, biological and molecular datasets, and research experience with NVIDIA's computing and AI capabilities to accelerate drug discovery and development.
NVIDIA has formed several partnerships with pharma companies in the last couple of years.
In January, NVIDIA announced a partnership with Eli Lilly and Co. to develop an AI co-innovation lab based in San Francisco that combines Lilly's drug discovery and manufacturing capabilities with NVIDIA's AI and computing infrastructure.
Through the collaboration, the two companies said they would invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and compute over five years to support the AI co-innovation lab.
Last year, the chip maker announced a partnership with Novo Nordisk to develop customized AI models and agents to assist with the pharma giant's drug discovery efforts.
Johnson & Johnson MedTech also announced last year the launch of the Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery in partnership with a coalition of companies, including NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services (AWS), to invest in projects and research that advance AI-enabled surgical innovation.
NVIDIA originally announced its partnership with Johnson & Johnson MedTech in 2024, aimed at accelerating and scaling AI for surgical decision-making, education and collaboration across the operating room.
